Sprocket Fetish

The rain in Clifden doesn't fall so much as it travels sideways with intent. I stood in the parking gravel of a bed-and-breakfast called Fred's Rest, my suitcase already soaked from the forty-second walk from the rental car, and watched a sheep chew on my D/s protocol checklist.

I had printed that checklist at home. Eleven pages, laminated, because I am the kind of woman who laminates. Zoe, twenty-eight years old, professional event planner, and I had scheduled this entire trip down to the quarter hour, including a column labeled "emotional check-in points." The sheep ate page four, the one with the negotiation limits.

"Well, hell," I said, to nobody, and the wind took the rest of the pages right out of my hand.

Inside, the place smelled like peat smoke, the good kind, the kind that makes you want to sit down immediately. Fred, the owner, was a wide man of about sixty-four with a laugh you could hear from the parking lot, and he was already talking before I got the door shut.

"You're the American! The one doing the, what was it, the event planning? Your man Wes is in the parlor waiting on you, has been for an hour, drinking my tea like it's free."

"It is free," I said.

"It is, but he's drinking a lot of it."

I wiped my shoes for too long, took a breath, and went in. Wes stood up from the little sofa, and there he was in person for the first time in eight months of chatting. Thirty-two, tall, forearms of a man who fixes bicycles for a living, which he does. He looked nervous, which helped me, because I was a bucket of nerves myself.

"Zoe," he said, and put out his hand.

"Hi. Hi. Sorry, I'm wet, I mean my suitcase is wet, I mean..."

I shook his hand. My phone, which I had propped up on my open suitcase because I still didn't fully trust my ear with the accent, decided this was the moment to announce things to the room. The translation app has been misfiring since Dublin. It said, in a loud robot voice, "This person wishes to engage in manual labor with you."

Fred, who had followed me in with a fresh pot of tea, nodded approvingly.

"Well, he does seem the handy type," Fred said. "Fixed my gate last summer, no charge."

"That is not what my phone meant," I said. "That is not what my phone meant at all."

Wes had gone a shade of red I will remember for the rest of my life. He sat back down, then thought better of it and stood again, and finally just laughed, which broke about half the tension in the room.

"It's all right," he said. "I did read your checklist. I know you like things in order."

"I laminated it," I admitted.

"The sheep got some of it," Fred offered helpfully. "I saw that from the window. Bad luck, sheep. Eat anything, them."

I decided the only way through was forward. We had agreed, online, months ago, on a formal greeting protocol. I was supposed to kneel when he presented the collar. The collar wasn't here yet, he'd said he'd bring it up later, but the kneeling part was supposed to happen first thing, the whole structure of it, and structure is my native language.

So I knelt, moving with all the grace of a filing cabinet, and my right knee came down directly on a Lego. A single Lego, bright green, left on the parlor rug by Fred's grandchild, who visits often.

The noise I made was not dignified. It was not submissive. It was the noise of a twenty-eight-year-old woman being stabbed in the kneecap by Danish plastic.

"JESUS MARY," Fred bellowed, and he crossed the parlor in three steps with a cold compress that I have to assume he keeps pre-made, because who has a cold compress ready in under four seconds. He pressed it to my knee while I sat on the floor with my skirt everywhere and my protocol nowhere.

"It's fine, Fred, really, it's fine."

"That's the little fella's tractor wheel piece, that is. I've told the boy. I've told him a hundred times."

Wes crouched down next to me, out of Fred's earshot, and said, quietly, "We can skip the kneeling. Or move it. Whatever you want."

"No. I flew across the Atlantic and a sheep ate my limits page. I'm doing the kneeling. It's just going to be from this seated position, effectively, since I'm already down here."

He laughed again, that low one, and put his hand on my shoulder, and I looked up at him, and for a second the whole ridiculous morning fell away and it was just the two of us in a room, finally, after eight months of messages at hours that wrecked both our sleep schedules.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm okay. I'm submitting from the floor, but I'm okay."

Fred went back to the kitchen, bless him, and Wes and I talked for an hour, actual talk, hands wrapped around free tea. Then he said he'd booked nothing, that he lived forty minutes away and could come back in the evening, and I said, in a voice I did not fully recognize as mine, that he could just stay. Fred had rooms. It was the off-season. The whole village was basically closed.

So Wes carried my suitcase up to my room, which is a thing that does something to a person who has been independent since age twenty-two, when a boyfriend in grad school told her she was too intense and she'd spent six years since then proving him wrong by being exactly that, just alone.

Wes kissed me once before he left the room to let me change. He asked first. "Can I kiss you now, Zoe?" He always asks. That's part of why I flew across an ocean for this man.

"Yes," I said, and it was a good kiss, unhurried, and then he said he'd be back in two hours and I should get ready, and he gave me an instruction, the first in-person instruction of my life.